Sylvie
Metal on metal, loud, bone-grinding impact. Feel it in my jaw. In my back teeth. Someone lays on their horn. How did it happen? The hard part was over. I escaped it. And I was careful, I was so careful. I don’t know who’s dead. Is someone dead?
We’ve both stopped in the middle of the road. All around us traffic stands still. On my right the truck’s side mirror is dangling, the driver’s door seized in. Slowly, the window comes down. Slowly, the driver’s ghostly hand emerges, gestures for me to follow.
I follow. Pull in next to him in the empty Staples parking lot and hang my head over the wheel and breathe, breathe, breathe.
But when I look, a woman is standing there. My mom’s age. T-shirt, jeans, mouse-brown hair to her chin. I can’t read her expression at all.
I get out of the car. “Are you okay?” My voice comes out wrong.
“Not a scratch on me,” she says. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” I tell her, but there’s so much adrenaline pumping through me that I wouldn’t know if I wasn’t.
“You look pretty shaken up. Is this your first fender bender?”
“No. It’s not.” What an understatement.
“Right. Well, then, you know the drill. I’m gonna call the police and they’ll come out to the scene to make a report for insurance. It might take a little bit. You don’t have anywhere to be?”
“No. I don’t.”
She’s digging out her phone from her tote bag. “It should go pretty fast, though, once I tell them I’m responsible.”
My brain can’t quite keep up. The first rule of car accidents: you don’t admit fault. My mom drilled that one into me. If you do, your insurance bill knows your bad driving caused the accident. You become a liability. A problem. You become way more expensive to insure.
God, if she only knew how expensive my insurance was now.
“You don’t need to do that.” I try to say it calmly. This woman shouldn’t cop to something she didn’t do just because I’m a total mess. “I don’t even know what happened, honestly.”
“What happened,” she tells me, “is that I was tired because I’m too stubborn to stop and pay for a motel room, what with the eclipse prices, and my attention went, and I let my car drift over the line and sideswipe yours.
Which is too bad. I’ve always loved a Sprinter.
Did you drive out here to watch the eclipse tomorrow? ”
Her kindness swallows me up. I don’t know what to say.
The woman squints at me, then shakes her head. “Oh, honey. Look at you. You’re sure this isn’t your first crash? Hold on, I’ll make the call and then we can talk it out.”
After she hangs up, and we survey the damage (two messed-up side mirrors, her banged-up door, not a lot else), she gets a cooler out of her car and plops it on her tailgate and we sit on either side of it and swing our legs.
We drink Diet Coke out of cans and together we stare out into the gathering dark, waiting for the cops to come.
“I’m in recovery,” she’s telling me. “From drinking. I’m in a twelve-step program—are you familiar?”
I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know exactly what that means.
“It makes you face things you wouldn’t otherwise want to look at.
Take responsibility for the damage you’ve done, no matter how bad it was, or how humiliating it feels to admit it.
For a long time I couldn’t. I spent a lot of time blaming everything and everyone else.
But there’s no freedom in that.” She smiles a little.
“Now it’s just like a muscle. Hurt someone’s feelings?
I own it. Whack some poor teenage girl with my gigantic truck? I take the fault.”
“You’re true, all the time.”
“Yeah. That’s a nice way to put it. I’m not a lie anymore.” She looks at me. “That make sense?”
“Yeah. It makes a lot of sense.”
She sips her Diet Coke, leaving me space to think.
Finally I say, “I don’t know if that would work for me.
I did something awful. Not on purpose, but I did it.
And now it follows me around everywhere.
I feel like, if people find out, they’d never want to talk to me again.
But telling people doesn’t make it easier, either.
I don’t know what to do. I guess I should—admit fault? ”
“What did you do?” she asks me, easily.
Then she waits for me to find the words. She waits a long time.